AUTHORSHIP Lennon (.5) and McCartney (.5)Because Aunt Mimi disapproved of John's music, John and Paul rarely wrote together at Menlove Avenue. One exception was 'I'll Get You'. This has always been one of Paul's favourite Beatles tracks; it is light-hearted, confident and shows how well he and John had already mastered the tricks of their trade. John later used a variation on the opening line in his song 'Imagine'. 'I'll Get You' was a 50-50 collaboration; what Paul calls 'very co-written'.McCARTNEY: "To me and John, though I can't really speak for him, words like 'imagine' and 'picture' were from Lewis Carroll. This idea of asking your listener to imagine, 'Come with me if you will. . .', 'Enter please into my. . .', 'Picture yourself in a boat. . .' It drew you in. It was a good little trick that. Both of us loved Lewis Carroll and the Alice books and were fascinated by his surreal world so this was a nice song to write. "It's got an interesting chord in it: 'It's not easy to pre-tend. . .' That was nicked from a song called 'All My Trials' which is on an album I had by Joan Baez: 'There's only one thing that money can't buy'. It's like D, which goes to an A minor, which is unusual, you'd normally go from a D to an A major. It's a change that had always fascinated me, so I put it in. I liked that slightly faggy way we sang. 'Oh yeah, oh yeah,' which was very distinctive, very Beatley." Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now

AUTHORSHIP Lennon (.5) and McCartney (.5) Just as Paul had an inclusion in the middle of "A Day In The Life", so John had one in the middle of Paul's "I've Got A Feeling". John's part - the "Everybody had a . . ." section - was a quite separately written song fragment, but it had the same tempo and was so well matched that they were able to link them together. John brought his section round to Cavendish Avenue and they finished the song together as an equal 50-50 collaboration. There is a myth that by point in their career, Paul and John were no longer working together; it is true that they no longer got together as they used to for songwriting sessions, but they were certainly very supportive of each other's songs and still checked them with each other. "I've Got A Feeling is a good example of their continuing partnership. Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now

RECORDEDJanuary 30, 1969, on the Apple Studios rooftop, after rehearsals held on January 22, 24, 27, and 28

Friday, February 24, 2006

AUTHORSHIP McCartney (1.00)McCARTNEY: "I wrote it for Cilla. That's not a bad little song. I remember when we first went over to America, plugging it to all these DJs, we used to talk endlessly, 'Look, there's this girl singer in our stable and you should listen out for this song.' It didn't do very well." Many Years

McCARTNEY: "I remember writing that in our front living room at Forthlin Road on my own so that's pretty much all mine. On the record we got Ringo to tape his knees. We were thinking in terms of singles and the next one had to always be different. We didn't want to fall into the Supremes trap where they all sounded rather similar, so to that end, we were always keen on having varied instrumentation. Ringo couldn't keep changing his drum kit, but he could change his snare, tap a cardboard box or slap his knees. There were certain songs I had from way back that I didn't really finish up, but they were in the back of my mind. . . . 'I'll Follow The Sun' was one of those." Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now

Thursday, February 23, 2006

CHART ACTIONUNITED KINGDOM: Released as a single November 27, 1964. It entered the chart at No. 1 and stayed there for six weeks, selling a million copies by December 11 and making it one of the fastest-selling singles ever in the United Kingdom. The Long and Winding Road: An Intimate Guide to the Beatles

LENNON: "With 'I Feel Fine', we were ready to get to No. 5 at first go, and I suppose if we'd have done that, we'd have been written off. Nobody would have remembered that The Beatles had had six No. 1's on the trot before 'I Feel Fine' . . . Coming in at No. 1 was great, because, well, we weren't sure we'd do it." The Beatles Off the Record: Outrageous Opinions & Unrehearsed Interviews

AUTHORSHIP Lennon (.7) and McCartney (.3)LENNON: "I wrote this at a recording session. It was tied together around the guitar riff that opens it." Beatles in Their Own Words

LENNON: "I actually wrote it around that riff that is going on in the background. I tried to get that effect in practically every song on our new album, but the others wouldn't have it. I told them I'd write a song especially for the riff, so they said, 'Yes, go away and do that,' knowing that we'd almost finished the album. Anyway, going into the studio one morning, I said to Ringo, 'I've written this song, but it's lousy.' But we tried it, complete with riff, and it sounded like an A-side, so we decided to release it just like that." The Beatles Off the Record: Outrageous Opinions & Unrehearsed Interviews

McCARTNEY: "The song itself was more John's than mine. We sat down and co-wrote it with John's original idea. John sang it, I'm on harmonies and the drumming is basically what we used to think of as 'What'd I Say' drumming. There was a style of drumming on 'What'd I Say' which is a sort of Latin R & B that Ray Charles' drummer Milt Turner played on the original record and we used to love it. One of the big clinching factors about Ringo as the drummer in the band was that he could really play that so well." Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now

RECORDEDOctober 18, 1964, at Abbey Road

LENNON: "This was the first time feedback was used on a record. It's right at the beginning." Hit Parader (April 1972)

McCARTNEY: "Don't be put off from the opening noise. It was a laugh. John was playing his Jumbo guitar and we did the final run through before recording, and when the red light came on for the actual session, he played it, unintentionally. The result was a sound of feedback and, after a bit of thought, we decided to leave it in. It's the biggest gimmick thing we've ever used!" The Beatles Off the Record: Outrageous Opinions & Unrehearsed Interviews

HARRISON: "John had an acoustic Gibson, well, an acoustic electric, 'cos it was amplified at the time, and he was standing in front of Paul's bass amplifier, and Paul just played the note A, which automatically set off the feedback on John's guitar. It was, sort of, magic at the time, that it happened, so we just kept it in because it sounded nice." The Beatles Off the Record: Outrageous Opinions & Unrehearsed Interviews

McCARTNEY: "John had a semi-acoustic Gibson guitar. It had a pick-up on it so it could be amplified. John and George both had them; we used to call them Everly Brothers because they were very similar to the ones the Everly Brothers had used and we liked the Everlys a lot. It was mainly an acoustic guitar. They only used a tiny bit of electric, just for colour. If you turned it up too much you don't get any string noise, so the engineers and George Martin used to strike a balance between the colour of the electric thing and the natural acoustic. It's a coloured acoustic. "We were just about to walk away to listen to a take when John leaned his guitar against the amp. I can still see him doing it. He really should have turned the electric off. It was only on a tiny bit, and John just leaned it against the amp when it went, 'Nnnnnnwahhhhh!' And we went, 'What's that? Voodoo!' 'No, it's feedback.' 'Wow, it's a great sound!' George Martin was there so we said, 'Can we have that on the record?' 'Well, I suppose we could, we could edit it on the front.' It was a found object, an accident caused by leaning the guitar against the amp." Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now

LENNON: ". . . the record with the first feedback anywhere. I defy anyone to find a record - unless it's some old blues record in 1922 - which uses feedback that way. I mean, everybody played with feedback on stage, and the Jimi Hendrix stuff was going on long before. In fact, the punk stuff now is only what people were doing in the clubs. So, I claim it for The Beatles. Before Hendrix, The Who, before anybody. The first feedback on any record." September 1980, All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono

COMMENTS BY BEATLESLENNON: "The selling part of the song, commercially, is the phrase 'I Feel Fine' and the guitar run that follows it. George and I play the same bit on guitar together on the record. I suppose it has a bit of a Country & Western feel about it, but then, so have a lot of our songs. The middle-eight is the most tuneful part to me, because it's a typical Beatles bit." The Beatles Off the Record: Outrageous Opinions & Unrehearsed Interviews

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

AUTHORSHIP Lennon (.8) and McCartney (.2)LENNON: "That was a very personal one of mine. In the early days I wrote less material than Paul because he was more competent on guitar than I. He taught me quite a lot of guitar really." Beatles in Their Own Words

McCARTNEY: " 'I Don't Want To Spoil The Party' is quite a nice little song, co-written by John and I. It sounds more like John than me so 80-20 to him, sitting down doing a job. Certain songs were inspirational and certain songs were work, it didn't mean they were any less fun to write, it was just a craft . . ." Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now

AUTHORSHIP McCartney (.9) and Lennon (.1)Written at Wimpole Street, in the Ashers' basement music room.

McCARTNEY: "I could do Little Richard's voice, which is a wild, hoarse, screaming thing, it's like an out-of-body experience. You have to leave your current sensibilities and go about a foot above your head to sing it. You have to actually go outside yourself. It's a funny little trick and when you find it, it's very interesting. A lot of people were fans of Little Richard so I used to sing his stuff but there came a point when I wanted one of my own, so I wrote 'I'm Down'. "I'm not sure if John had any input on it, in fact I don't think he did. But not wishing to be churlish, with most of these I'll always credit him with 10 per cent just in case he fixed a word or offered a suggestion. But at least 90 per cent of that would be mine. It's really a blues song. We weren't raised in the American South, so we don't know about Route 66 and the levee and the stuff in all the blues songs. We know about the Cast-Iron Shore and the East Lancs Motorway but they never sounded as good to us, because we were in awe of the Americans. Even their Birmingham, Alabama, sounded better than our Birmingham. "So 'I'm Down' was my rock 'n' roll shouter. I ended up doing it at Shea Stadium. It worked very well for those kind of places, it was a good stage song, and inasmuch as they are hard to write, I'm proud of it. Those kind of songs with hardly any melody, rock 'n' roll songs, are much harder to write than ballads, because there's nothing to them." Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now

COMMENTS BY OTHERSSTEVE TYLER, of Aerosmith: ". . . The first song we ever recorded was 'I'm Down.' It was something like eighteen years ago (1969), five years before Aerosmith was even formed. We needed a demo to present to MGM Records. So we went to this Beatles memorabilia store, got the tape, listened to it three times, ran back to the studio and put it down live. . . ." ENS (November 8, 1987)

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

AUTHORSHIP Lennon (.8) and McCartney (.2)Sometimes John and Paul would work on a song at Melove Avenue. One of the early songs written in John's cozy, untidy bedroom above the porch was 'I Call Your Name'. Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now

McCARTNEY: "We worked on it together, but it was John's idea. When I look back at some of these lyrics, I think, 'Wait a minute. What did he mean?' 'I call your name but you're not there.' Is it his mother? His father? I must admit I didn't really see that as we wrote it because we were just a couple of young guys writing. You didn't look behind it at the time, it was only later you started analysing things." Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now

Monday, February 20, 2006

AUTHORSHIP McCartney (.8) and Lennon (.2)Co-written by John and Paul in the early Liverpool days.McCARTNEY: "It's a little bit too June-moon for me, but these were very early songs and they worked out quite well." Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now

Thursday 4 April 1963BBC Paris Studio, London'I'll Be On My Way' is of particular interest for it was the Beatles' only studio-environment recording and known public performance of a Lennon-McCartney song given exclusively to Billy J Kramer with the Dakotas for record release: they taped their version at EMI Studios on 14 March and released the track on 26 April as the B-side of 'Do You Want To Know A Secret', another - though not so exclusive - Lennon-McCartney original. The Complete Beatles Chronicle

McCARTNEY: " 'I'll Be Back' was co-written but it was largely John's idea. When we knew we were writing for something like an album he would write a few in his spare moments, like a batch here. He'd bring them in, we'd check 'em. I'd write a couple and we'd throw 'em at each other, and then there would be a couple that were more co-written. But you just had a certain amount of time. You knew when the recording date was and so a week or two before then we'd get into it." Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now

LENNON: "The first line was written on one acid trip one weekend. The second line was written on the next acid trip the next weekend, and it was filled in after I met Yoko. . . . "[The walrus] came from 'The Walrus and the Carpenter.' Alice In Wonderland. To me, it was a beautiful poem. . . . [Later I] realized that the walrus was the bad guy in the story, and the carpenter was the good guy. I thought, 'Oh, shit, I picked the wrong guy. I should have said, "I am the carpenter." ' But that wouldn't have been the same, would it?" September 1980, All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono

McCARTNEY: "He [John] was a big Lewis Carroll fan, which I was too. In my view two of John's great songs, 'Strawberry Fields' and 'I Am The Walrus', both come from 'Jabberwocky'. 'I am he as you are he ...' It's thanks to 'Jabberwocky' that he could do that." Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now

Recorded only nine days after Brian Epstein's death, John sounds in real pain: "I'm crying!" Far from being light-hearted nonsense verse, John's lyrics are a desperate howl of frustration. The 'Eggman' in the lyrics is almost certainly Eric Burdon, who was known to his friends as 'Eggs' because he was fond of breaking eggs over naked girls during sex. In Eric's autobiography he describes an orgy in Mayfair, following an evening at the Scotch of St. James, in which John Lennon watches him break amyl nitrate capsules under the noses of two half-naked girls and follow this up with two raw eggs. John is quoted as encouraging him, "Go on, go get it, Eggman. Go for it. I've been there already, it's nice." Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now

McCARTNEY: "They were big tall concrete structures that we could get people up on the top of, waving their arms. We gave people rubber egg-head skull caps, and we had a walrus. It was all directly from Alice in Wonderland, the walrus, the carpenter and all that surrealist stuff. John had just written "I Am The Walrus" and it was decided therefore it should go in the film. It is one of John's great songs and it is very Lennon. "Even now I'm a bit shy to say I was the director of Magical Mystery Tour although it was the fact: it was me that was first up in the morning, me that virtually directed the whole thing. So being the de facto director, I would go and say good night to everyone. Just to check on the team. I was saying good night to John in the hotel in Cornwall and saying thanks for doing the Nat Jackley thing. I was standing at the door and he was in bed, and we were talking about the lyrics of "I Am The Walrus", and I remember feeling he was a little frail at that time, maybe not going through one of the best periods in life, probably breaking up with his wife. He was going through a very fragile period. You've only got to look at his lyrics - 'sitting on a cornflake waiting for the van to come'. They were very disturbed lyrics." Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now

RECORDEDSeptember 5, 1967, at Abbey Road, with overdubbing September 6 and 27

They knew from their first two films that they needed to record the songs for the film in order to be able to mime to them. The recording of John's "I Am The Walrus" began on September 5.

McCARTNEY: "John worked with George Martin on the orchestration and did some very exciting things with the Mike Sammes Singers, the likes of which they've never done before or since, like getting them to chant, 'Everybody's got one, everybody's got one ...', which they loved. It was a session to be remembered. Most of the time they got asked to do 'Sing Something Simple' and all the old songs, but John got them doing all sorts of swoops and phonetic noises. It was a fascinating session. That was John's baby, great one, a really good one." Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now

The fragment of a live BBC broadcast of King Lear which appears at the end of this song was the direct result of Paul telling John about John Cage using randomly tuned radios in his compositions. John had a radio set up and began twiddling the knob. Since the BBC had a monopoly over radio broadcasting, it wasn't long before he came upon a reading of Shakespeare that he liked. The mix captures a portion of Act IV, Scene 6 of King Lear. Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now

McCARTNEY: "I had been talking to John about this. Having been turned on myself, naturally I would turn the guys on to it. Not claiming any credit, it's just that I was listening to more of that stuff." Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now

MISCELLANEOUSA surrealistic performance was included in the Magical Mystery Tour film. The U.S. and U.K. versions of this song differ. Capitol made the U.S. Rarities version by editing the few extra beats in the middle of the U.S. single version with the U.K. version, which has the introductory riff repeated six times instead of four. The Long and Winding Road: An Intimate Guide to the Beatles

"PAUL IS DEAD" Hysteria: The Shakespearean actors say these ominous lines near the end of the song: "What, is he dead?" "Bury my body," and "O, untimely death."

COMMENTS BY BEATLESLENNON: "I like that one. That was the time when I was putting Hare Krishna and all that down. I hadn't taken it up then." Hit Parader (April 1972)

LENNON: "Even Walrus was banned on the BBC at one time, because it said 'Knickers'." December 6, 1980, The Last Lennon Tapes

LENNON: "All of them had tongue in cheek, you know, I don't, just because other people see depths of whatever in it, you know, what doesn it really mean 'I Am the Eggman'? You know, it could have been the pudding basin for all I cared. It was just tongue in cheek, it's not that serious." December 6, 1980, The Last Lennon Tapes